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Software

WCF Data Services 5.0 RTM Release – The WCF Data Services Team announces the release of the RTM edition of WCF Data Services 5 (previously known as Project Astoria). This release introduces Vocabulary terms for controlling data and mappings, support for Actions to inject behavior into data models, improved spatial data features, new and updated OData libraries and Entity Data Model libraries, and much more. Glenn Gailey gives some further details in his post ‘My Favorite Things in OData v3 and WCF Data Services 5.0‘

April 2012 Update for Visual Studio 11 Beta – Xinyang Qiu highlights the general availability of the April update for Visual Studio 11 beta. This release addresses a number of issues with the product across most product areas, improving the stability of the product.

jQuery Mobile 1.1.0 RC2 Released – The jQuery Mobile team announce their second release candidate release of jQuery Mobile 1.1.0. The team have been at work since the RC1 release addressing reported issues and honing the 1.0 functionality to be the best it can be in this new release.

Announcing the Refresh of Service Bus EAI & EDI Labs – The Windows Azure team announce an update to the Service Bus Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) and Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) features labs. This is a second cut, and gives you the opportunity to explore and share early opinions on these possible future features.

dotCover 2.0 Early Access Open – JetBrains announce the start of their ‘Early Access Program’ for dotCover 2.0, their next major version of their code coverage tooling. 2.0 brings integration with VS11 beta along with previous IDE versions, an integrated test runner, and extended attribute based filtering.

Information

AsyncBridge? Async on .NET 4.0 using VS11 – Alex Davies highlights an interesting snippet of code from Daniel Grunwald which allows you to use the real C#5 compiler, yet target .NET 4.0, giving you something equivalent to the functionality offered in the ASync CTP for VS2010 which is now rather old, and difficult to install.

Make Async Your Buddy With Reactive Extensions – Phil Haack gives an introduction to the Reactive Extensions for .NET, looking at how it makes Async programming a breeze with its powerful and rich syntax. Phill shares some sample code, and also directs you to some more detailed resources on the subject.

Overriding Stream Asynchrony – Stephen Toub takes a look at the various Async methods provided by the framework on the Stream class in the .NET Framework 4.5 beta, discussing what their base implementations do and when you should override them in your own stream implementations

Type initializer circular dependencies – Jon Skeet shares a look at circular dependencies in type initializer code, showing how these types of dependencies can occur, and exploring how you can manipulate the initializers to make them work as you intend, although suggesting that there are better alternatives generally.

System.DateTime: Good practices and common pitfalls – David Rickard shares a number of key pieces of best practice when working with System.DateTime in your code, helping you to avoid a whole range of errors which can occur when using dates without thinking about how you are using them.

Hidden Gems in Visual Studio 11 Beta – .NET Portable Class Libraries – Scott Hanselman discusses the inclusion of the .NET Portable Class Libraries feature into Visual Studio 11 Beta, making it easier to create libraries which target and work on multiple .NET based platforms, taking into account the various libraries and features available on each platform.

Improving how we update Visual Studio – Dave Lubash and David Guyer of the Visual Studio Team discusses the improved update story being introduced in Visual Studio 11, making it easier to keep your IDE up to date.

Elegance, thy Name is jQuery – Steve Wellens shares a look at a tough jQuery question from StackOverflow, digging into how the power of jQuery makes the answer to this complex question succinct and relatively understandable.

EF5 Performance Considerations – David Obando of the Entity Framework Team highlights a whitepaper which discusses the performance implications of using Entity Framework 4 and 5, and looking at how you can get the most performance out of your EF based applications.

Community

DDD South West 4.0 – Registrations for this year’s Developer Developer Developer! South West event open today at 10am BST. The event, on Saturday 26th May 2012 at UWE near Bristol brings together a great agenda from top speakers (and there is also a session from me), and is sure to be a ‘not to miss’ event. Spaces will go quickly for this one, so get your registration finger ready…